Pew Research Center has published their detailed report Beyond Red and Blue: The Political Typology.
The way I read it, it’s discouraging. It’s not obvious to me that the people this survey is about – us, that is – have the tools we need and the skills we need to do the things we would need to be doing to solve the problems it reveals we have. Which is probably why we have these problems in the first place.
I realize that just because I don’t see the positive possibilities it doesn’t mean there aren’t any. As William Sloane Coffin said,
Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart’s full of hope, you can be persistent when you can’t be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I’m not optimistic, I’m always very hopeful.
On the other hand, it would be nice to have an idea or two about how to be helpful.
Image: “Jeremiah,” Ilya Repin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Matters of Interpretation 
